Dumitru Staniloae

'Staniloae seeks always to indicate the inner coherence of dogmatic truth and the significance of each dogma for the personal life of the Christian. It is the theologian's task to make manifest the link between dogma and personal spirituality, to show how every dogma responds to a deep need and longing in the human heart, and how it has practical consequences for society. Dogmas, he is convinced, do not enslave but liberate; theology is essentially freedom.' Kallistos Ware>

Orthodox Dogmatic Theology

Kallistos Ware

This book brings together essays by two outstanding Orthodox theologians to examine the paradox of time in relation to the eternity of God: Dumitru Stăniloae’s, ‘Eternity and Time’, a talk given to the Sisters of the Love of God in 1971, was expanded in the first volume of his Teologia dogmatica ortodoxa (3 vols., Bucharest, 1978). The preface to the 1994 English translation of that work, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, written by Kallistos Ware, was based on his essay, ‘Time: Prison or Path to Freedom?’, which was first published in 1989 by SLG Press. These reflections, brought together for the first time here, remain at the forefront of modern theology. Stăniloae illuminates time as a journey on which we may grow in response to the love that God offers us, a journey towards sharing in the eternity of the perfect, interpersonal communion of the Trinity. God, in His Incarnation, shares the journey with us in Christ, so that time enters into eternity, and eternity is brought into time. At every moment we are free to choose between responding to His love or rejecting it. Ware’s essay explains that it is the vocation of time to be open to eternity; time is fulfilled when God’s eternity breaks into the temporal sequence, as happened supremely at Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, as happens also at every Eucharist. Our faith is the true rationale of time: mutual love after the image of the Trinity.

Time

The long-awaited second of six planned volumes in translation of this, the greatest masterpiece of modern Orthodox theology. Staniloae develops a theology of creation, humanity, the unseen world of angels and demons, the fall of humanity, providence and the deification of the world.

Dumitru Staniloae

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